Every two years, in the second week of September, Maroustica hosts a chess game. The place of wooden figurines is taken by living people, and the score board is the very square of the tiny medieval town, whose pavement was thought out especially for this purpose. For this reason, the Maroustica Piazza Castello is also called Piazza degli Scacchi. The story goes that, in medieval times, two young nobles, Rinaldo D’Angarano and Vieri da Vallanora, fell madly in love with Lionora, the daughter of the local lord. The custom of the time demanded that the girl’s fate be decided through a duel. But the father does not wish to make enemies, he wishes no blood spilt, so he forbids the duel and proposes a chess game in its stead. The winner was to become the husband of the coveted Lionora. The loser would not lose, but instead win the hand of the younger daughter, Oldrada. Of course, the story has no basis in historical fact. Not one of the characters in the story ever existed, just as there was no chess match in the medieval Marostica, a town called in the local Venetian dialect, Maròstega. But there was a writer and an architect called Mario Mirko Vucetich from Dalmatia, who imagined the entire story right after the Second World War. And the local chess club found it proper to consider the story true and to organise, every two years, a competition with living people as chess pieces in the scenic square and with real medieval origins of the tiny town of Marostica, from northern Italy.

In 1278, count Berthold von Rabenswal receives from Emperor Rudolph I von Habsburg the right of ownership over the Hardegg land. He begins at once the building of a new settlement next to an existing village, called Rezze. He will follow a regular plan, in the style of Bohemian burgs, around a square that remains to this day among the largest in Austria, although the current population of the settlement numbers only 4000 people. The square is beautiful, with Italian inspired Renaissance palaces, fountains and a Baroque column of the Holy Trinity. In the middle stands the city hall, a former church, repurposed in 1569. But the bigger surprise lies beneath the pavement: under the square, under the entire town and even beyond lies a labyrinth of interconnected cellars, where the inhabitants have deposited local wine. It is over 20 km long, far greater than the network of streets above.